Paper Tiger Burning

I respectfully credit all Original Creators, namely Squaresoft, which became SquareEnix,for these characters. In this way, I pay homage to my Fandom's Original Creator, and illustrate my Community's belief that Fan Fiction is "fair use". I do not claim to own these characters. I do not make money or gil from using these protected characters, nor do I wish to make money or gil from them. In other words, I am borrowing these characters to entertain the adult fanfiction community, but I am doing so with the highest degree of respect to the engineers, game designers, music makers, and voice actors.




I saw Hojo wince as I entered the lab. Pleased, I strolled over to the nearest stool and perched on it. I’d visited him every day these last three days, tormenting him in any way I could. “Are you bugged?” I asked.

Hojo’s black eyes, dull until this point with anticipated pain, sharpened. “Bugged? By whom?”

“The Shinra gruesome twosome,” I answered, picking up one of his boxes of takeout. By the smell of it I could safely eat his stir fry shrimp even though it had been sitting unattended for awhile. It amazed me sometimes that Hojo could power his brain with the tiny amount of fuel he put in his body. “I had bugs in my office, remember?”

Hojo tucked his clipboard under his arm. “Why would they plant bugs in my office? I can understand why they’d spy on you, but I’m going about my business.” Absently, he scratched at the S-shaped scab in the middle of his forehead.

“Father,” I drawled, watching him wince again. “This is Shin-Ra we’re discussing.”

“Don’t call me that,” he muttered. His arms clenched at his sides tightly.

“Why not?”

“Someone might hear you.”

“True.” I started eating his food. “But I like to live dangerously.”

“No one would ever have known,” Hojo snapped sarcastically, returning to his file. He flipped a few papers over the spine of the clipboard and marked something off with pencil. “You’ve been acting strange for three days now,” he said. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Perhaps lack of sleep,” I replied. “My thoughts keep me up at night. I have all sorts of thoughts, dad.”

Hojo flinched this time. He put his work down and came over to me, forgetting to be afraid. “Stop it, Sephiroth,” he hissed. “This isn’t doing either one of us any good.”

Feeling mischievous, I stood up and held my arms out. Before he could completely stop moving I had him in a tight embrace. Hojo struggled valiantly, but I held him fast. “You don’t know how long I’ve wanted a parent,” I said, my voice sickeningly sweet. “And to think I had one with me all this time!”

“Let go of me, you behemoth!” Hojo writhed violently, wheezing. “If you want a parent you’re going to have to quit squeezing!”

I gave him a bruising hug before releasing him. “As if you’d ever be my father,” I retorted, feeling bitter now that I’d stirred him up. Tormenting him seemed only fun in the petty way now that I’d taken some of his hair. Some small part of me didn’t reject him as a father figure; it sickened me to admit that to myself. I’d been willing enough for a parent to take an alien, after all. “You haven’t one iota, one single drop of sentiment for your own blood,” I went on. “I’m sure the only pride you ever took in me was your own handiwork.”

To my surprise Hojo wouldn’t meet my eyes. Saying nothing, he went back to his work, his head downcast and his hands shaking. Guilt and illness rolled off of him in waves so strong I easily felt his distress. He knocked over a vial and quickly righted it. Drawing a trembling hand over his enflamed scar, he released a breathy puff of air.

“What?” I asked simply.

“Nothing.” Hojo looked anywhere but at me. He knew I could pluck what I wanted from his head, and that I would make it painful and slow.

“So, what have you reported to baby Shinra?” I asked, changing the subject and using his own nickname for Rufus. I would get what I wanted eventually; right now I just wanted to fuss him. “You haven’t given me the psych exam yet. Planning on using Gast’s old tests?”

Hojo fingers coiled over a mug. Slowly, he drank of something steaming. “Psychiatry isn’t my strong point,” he murmured a moment later.

I considered how my insanity probably had a lot to do with his. Perhaps if he hadn’t been crazy I wouldn’t have been either.

“You never did tell me how you accomplished my resurrection,” I said, changing the topic again.

Hojo swallowed hard, pushing his glasses up farther on his nose. “It was… unconventional,” he replied quietly. “Shin-Ra had a program of you for a training sim, a near perfect copy. I captured the atomic map of it and introduced living blood with a strip of skin cells. That’s why you still have your tattoo.”

Brilliant. But no one ever accused him of being stupid.

“And the Cetra?” I asked.

“The same. I would have used her mother’s cells and blood instead, but they didn’t survive. Thankfully I had a large resource of memories and more of her daughter’s genetic material. Gast’s daughter was my next and only resort for an Ancient.”

“Ah. I didn’t know she was Gast’s child,” I said. It was easy to conjure this lie since I’d had the information only a few days.

Hojo cut surprised eyes to me. “You didn’t? But you and she…played together, if one could call it that. You were older by eight years; you should remember her.”

I didn’t remember at all, and apparently Aerith didn’t either. Interesting. “My memories have been unreliable,” I said dryly. “Jenova rearranged my brain to suit her. I must have been only a somewhat palatable host.”

“But your body is pre- Nibelheim,” Hojo said, starting to flip through a large folder with my name and number on it. Some of the papers were so old he had to lay them on the desk to keep from smudging or cracking them. He sat down, his greasy nose inches from a set of graphs, muttering to himself. His fingers groped for a pencil. Finding one, he started scribbling on a clean notepad. “Where is your EEG chart for the Spring of…” He jerked suddenly. “I took a hiatus that season.”

“Fascinating,” I sighed. “What are you babbling about?”

“I keep track of your brain activity,” Hojo said, frowning. “One entire year is missing from your file. No EEG’s or PET’s.”

“Why would anyone want those?”

“I can’t believe anyone would,” Hojo retorted. “I keep most of my files in my own shorthand. The only other person who could read my code was…” His eyes narrowed. “Gast,” he finished. “We developed the code together when we started working for Shin-Ra. He quit using it because he had to give copies of his work to the elder Shinra and I continued on because no one asked for my findings. They couldn’t read them without the codes, after all.”

“And why would Gast have taken one of my files from you?”

“He did everything he could to thwart me!” Hojo threw a paperweight across the room. It hit the wall, dented it and ricocheted back. “He knew I had to have the reminder, that I wouldn’t check that charting unless two scans came back with anomalies!” Hojo began flipping through more recent charts with an almost frantic mien. “Is there anything recent? Did we do EEG or PET readings on you after I revived you?” He shook his head. “I forgot! How could I forget?”

“Calm down.” I stood up and took the file away from him, setting it on the desk. “What are you upset about?”

Hojo’s eyes bugled as he stared at me wildly. “Gast must have taken a pivotal chart,” he cried out. “I can’t go backward if the starting point is gone!”

Losing patience, I slid a stool over and shoved him onto it. “What difference does it make? Stop obsessing over the damn file; it wouldn’t do you any good to read it anyway. Those years are long gone and I’m well set into my form, except for a few mental aberrations.”

Hojo shuddered. I moved away, went back to eating his lunch for him. “Just call in another psychiatrist,” I said. “I’ll take an examination. You can do another EEG reading if you like.”

Hojo nodded jerkily.

I smiled to myself. “We can do the EEG now and you can call me when you find a decent shrink.”

Again Hojo nodded, his eyes straying back to my file. As we began walking to the radiology department I grinned. An EEG procedure wouldn’t show the missing report in my pocket.

************************************************************************************

“Hold your arms at the ready, but don’t stiffen up,” Sephiroth admonished me. He corrected my posture, using his foot to bring my foot closer to my body. “You keep forgetting you have a lower body.”

“I do not,” I protested, slinging my braid back.

“Don’t quarrel with me.” Sephiroth took the staff from my hands, or rather, he plucked it from me. “Walk to that rock and back.”

I pivoted and walked toward the damned rock. This was the third time he’d ended an argument by telling me to walk here. I didn’t see what he meant by it. The walk wasn’t difficult and took two minutes at the most.

I did not forget about my lower body. How could he say that? I used my lower body all the time. Well, most of the time. Hadn’t he said I was graceful? He couldn’t say I was graceful and then contradict himself this way. I should tell him.

I circled the rock, facing his statuesque, almost-faraway form. Just his outline seemed imposing. I fumed that he never looked unsure. He had more confidence in his little finger than I did in my whole body. But why? Why did he make me feel so timid? I’d gone on a lot of adventures too, proved I could handle monsters and raw fatigue.

Those glittering, mako-infused eyes could make anyone feel timid. But I met them.

“Do you know why I keep making you walk?” he asked upon my return.

“To keep from hitting me?” I joked.

Sephiroth rolled his eyes. “To watch your movement and to test your patience,” he answered. “So far neither seem flawed, so why can’t you defend in the proper position?” He threw the staff back to me. “Your reasoning for the use of a staff hinged upon its defense capability.”

“And I meant it,” I insisted. “I’d rather keep everything at bay than attack with a sword.”

At this, Sephiroth cocked his head. “I understand, I think,” he murmured. “You don’t even consider this a weapon, do you?” He hefted his own staff. “This is a non-lethal means to get your point across.”

“Sure.” I copied his stance. “I guess to you it’s a means to directly kill or destroy?”

“Naturally.” Sephiroth twirled the staff around his arm, his gaze going upward to the tree tops. “Do you really prefer to leave your opponent able to rise against you?” he asked quietly. “A monster will recover only to attack the next wanderer. A rapist or murderer will lick their wounds before finding another victim.” His eyes came back to mine, glittering enigmatically. “Your kindness to one who attacks you is defeatist twice over. You put yourself in unnecessary danger and possibly leave another, weaker person open for misery and death.”

I’d never thought of it that way. Additionally, I’d relied upon others to deal death blows, keeping my hands clean. Suddenly I felt overwhelmingly naïve and selfish. My friends had relied upon me and had never once mentioned the fact that I hated to kill.

“Don’t beat yourself up yet,” Sephiroth said, interrupting my inner monologue of self-recrimination. “I’m not sure what’s natural for you; it could be that you’ll sacrifice healing power for aggression.” He sat upon a rock and looked at me. “Let me think a moment. Good and evil are so subjective.”

I sat down too. He spoke truly of good and evil, I thought. They were needed powers that needed each other.

Sephiroth made a noise of disbelief. I glanced up at him, wondering if he’d puzzled out this eternal mystery against all others.

“I’m going about it all wrong,” he said. He jumped down. Collecting our staves, he tossed them into the underbrush. “What a relief. I thought I’d finally met someone I couldn’t teach.”

“Hey!” I stood up and brushed off my pants with an angry jerk. “I’m quite educable!”

“We’ll see. You have a hard head.” Sephiroth took my wrist between his thumb and second finger, appearing to measure. “Are you allergic to any metal?”

“Not that I know of,” I said, wondering what he was doing.

“Good.” Sephiroth picked me up. In a second we were soaring upward. “I have an idea but we’ll have to try it later,” he said, pushing off from a tree top. “You get a reprieve tonight. I hope that means you’ll cook.”